Thursday, August 24, 2006

A Call to Honour...

But his recent ‘A Call to Honour...’ is what perhaps India would remember him by. For records, the book refers to an official in P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Prime Ministerial Office who leaked secret information about India’s nuclear plans to USA. It’s a serious charge & amounts to treason. PM Manmohan Singh struck back, asking for the name of the mole and evidence to substantiate the allegation. Jaswant had none, neither the name nor the evidence. The meek evidence – a letter also met a similar fate. Both its alleged author Thomas Graham (then a programme officer at Rockfeller Foundation) and recipient Harry Barnes (former US envoy), denied the existence of such a letter, leaving Jaswant red-faced. The development has been a major embarrassment to the BJP with many party leaders demanding his head. “It was an avoidable controversy,” said his Rajya Sabha colleague, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. Congress leader Jayanti Natrajan went a step further accusing Singh of kicking off the row to sell his book.

So does this controversy portend the demise of this soldier’s future? If such controversies had the power to do that, then perhaps half of India’s parliamentarians might not have existed as on date, eh! The soldier surely continues to plod, and rise with the power of the pen!